Chapter Fouteen Towards a smart navigation of cemeteries as cultural sites

Over the last years a great effort has been done to give cemeteries the status of cultural sites. The original hesitancy for tourists to visit cemeteries is fading, and a new tourism category, also known as dark tourism, is emerging [1]. In addition, in some cases, people are encouraged to use cemeteries as parks, because of the presence of green areas where it is possible to walk, cycle or bring dogs [2,3]. From this perspective, it is important to equip graveyard areas with new services, available also on the Web, helping common people and tourists to move freely, easily finding the graves of loved ones and famous people, and funerary monuments. Many initiatives have been proposed following this line, such as interactive maps, cemetery tours and pages describing entities within the cemetery, such as points of interest, services, persons, events and places. The main limitation of all the existing initiatives consists essentially in two aspects: a) a relation among different entities is completely missing, i.e. each funerary monument is identified as a single, isolated point, b) a cultural route, crossing all the most important entities of the cemetery, is not defined. In this paper, we would like to propose a Web application allowing a smart navigation of cemeteries. The application has a design that is familiar to the users, as it is inspired by popular mapping applications, and is well suited for mobile devices. A user can search for a person and be guided to a particular grave, or a historical period or a given kind of art, and have a thematic tour specially devised for them. The knowledge related to the cemetery is modeled as a graph [4], where each node represents an entity and the edges between two nodes their relation (Fig. 1). This way, the information contained in the graph can become very rich and complex.